A Dense Phase Descriptor for Human Ear Recognition

Ear print is an imminent biometric modality that has been attracting increasing attention in the biometric community. However, compared with well-established modalities, such as face and fingerprints, a limited number of contributions has been offered on ear imaging. Moreover, only several studies address the aspect of ear characterization (i.e., feature design). In this respect, in this paper, we propose a novel descriptor for ear recognition. The proposed descriptor, namely, dense local phase quantization (DLPQ) is based on the phase responses, which is generated using the well-known LPQ descriptor. Furthermore, local dense histograms are extracted from the horizontal stripes of the phase maps followed by a pooling operation to address viewpoint changes and, finally, concatenated into an ear descriptor. Although the proposed DLPQ descriptor is built on the traditional LPQ, we particularly show that drastic improvements (of over 20%) are attained with respect to this latter descriptor on two benchmark data sets. Furthermore, the proposed descriptor stands out among recent ear descriptors from the literature.